I've just finished watching the latest episode of Five Things, where Suz Hinton talks with Burke about Goo Goo Clusters and IoT devices. One of the devices Suz showed was the Azure IoT DevKit - an arduino compatible board made by MXChip that works beautifully with Azure, even down to having an Azure LED on board to show when it is connecte…

I recently recorded a quick video to talk about an app I was building using the Azure free account. You can check it out here: If you want to see the code, it's in my GitHub repo here - https://github.com/jimbobbennett/AzurePhotoSharer…

Thought I'd repost a blog post I wrote 4 1/2 years ago on Medium onto this blog - be interested in what readers think. Shouldn’t our default position be to trust first? I was having a conversation with a friend of mine recently about his current work situation. His team leader has a default state of not trusting in the knowledge and abilities of th…

Dentists don't want you to know these 5 tips that show how easy it is to run multiple Azure Functions apps locally and debug them all at the same time! Number 3 will shock you! Enough ClickBait nonsense, on to the post. I recently built a demo app that has two Azure Functions projects in it - one using the new V2 Functions runtime and written i…

I've been working on an app that needs push notifications, but also needs to be open source. This led me to a problem - the google-services.json file. This file is needed to sign up for Firebase messaging to implement push on Android, but it also contains my API keys, values I do NOT want to be public. So - what to do? Well I'm building and distrib…

In the first part of this post, I showed how to get started binding the Microsoft Cognitive Services speech API. In the second part I showed how to make the code look more C#-like. In this part, I'll show how to use it and fix up a nasty issue with the Android compiler and using jars created with the latest versions of Java. Using the SDK To use th…

In the first part of this post, I showed how to get started binding the Microsoft Cognitive Services speech API. In this part I show how to make the code look more C#-like. In the third part I'll show how to use it and fix up a nasty issue with the Android compiler and using jars created with the latest versions of Java. Making the namespaces more…

As part of the Microsoft Cognitive Services speech API, there is a native Java Android SDK available as an .aar file. I wanted to use this in a Xamarin app, so I created a binding project for it. The code for this is available in my GitHub. Binding an SDK is a four step process: Create the binding project with the relevant jar or aar file Make any…

I created a NuGet package a while ago to allow you to run models exported from the Azure Custom Vision service on iOS and Android in Xamarin apps from your cross-platform code. You can read about this here. Since then, the Custom Vision service has added ONNX export, meaning you can now run these models on-device on Windows as well. This meant it…

Recently I wrote about creating AI models using the Azure Custom Vision Service. In these posts I looked at creating and training models, running them online, then finally exporting the models to run on iOS using CoreML and Android using TensorFlow. Recently Microsoft announced another way to export models - as ONNX models that can be run using Win…

I spend most of my developer day using Visual Studio for Mac, but occasionally I flip back to Visual Studio 2017 on Windows. Last time I flipped back I tried to build an app that uses the camera and I got stuck on one simple thing - setting the camera usage description. If you double click on the info.plist file in an iOS app project, it will open…

I've been playing a lot with F# recently, both to build Xamarin apps using Elmish.XamarinForms and for some Azure Functions. Whilst building an HTTP trigger I came across some weirdness when serializing a record type to JSON. This is the relevant parts of my code: type Output = { TotalBalance : float } let Run(req: HttpRequestMessage, boundTable: I…

I recently gave an introduction to Xamarin talk at Imperial College, London and wanted to build a cool app to show off what you can do on mobile using the awesome Cognitive Services available on Azure. I only had about 30-40 minutes to not only introduce Xamarin, but build an app so I decided to throw together a simple app to take a photo and descr…

Finally, after 2 years since I first put pen to paper (well, put keystroke to Atom), Xamarin in Action is done and available from your favorite bookseller as a printed, paper book, with a forward from my good friend, the amazing James Montemagno! You can buy this book in one of two ways - an eBook in PDF, kindle, iBook format, or a prin…

TL;DR - check out Xamarin Essentials in the official documentation. Like a lot of developers, I love how Xamarin allows me to share business logic between iOS and Android apps, and share UI using Forms, but still have access to the native APIs. But one thing has been missing - a consistent, out of the box way of accessing native APIs from cross-pla…